Disney+ readying Game of Thrones-inspired shared universe of Star Wars shows?

There’s a Star Wars rumor gaining traction on the internet, with multiple sites picking up a report from LRM Online that has some eyebrow-raising news about Disney’s plans for the future of Star Wars on TV. Obviously, attention must be paid.

Let’s start at the start. Disney had a hit with The Mandalorian, the first-ever live-action Star Wars TV show. People immediately got invested in the story of lone bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) connecting with the adorable Baby Yoda, and are eager to see them try and find Baby Yoda’s people when the second season drops this October.

But this is Disney we’re talking about; they always have bigger plans. Part of what made The Mandalorian so fun was that it was a show onto itself; you didn’t need to have a deep knowledge of the rest of Star Wars to enjoy it. But we soon heard that, in the second season, showrunner Dave Filoni would be bringing in established Star Wars characters, including Rosario Dawson as ex-Jedi Ahsoka Tano, Katee Sackhoff as Bo-Katan (both characters from Dave Filoni’s animated Star Wars shows), and Temuera Morrison as Boba Fett. (And also maybe Timothy Olyphant as Boba Fett? It’s unclear.)

The point is that Disney’s simple little show is about to get a lot more complicated, and that may just be the overture to Disney’s sinister symphony. After Rosario Dawson is introduced as a live-action Ahsoka, there are rumors that she’ll get her own show. We’ve also heard whispers of a show all about Grand Admiral Thrawn, a popular character from the Extended Star Wars Universe that Filoni repurposed for his show Star Wars Rebels. And this is all on top of planned miniseries about Obi-Wan Kenobi and Cassian Andor from Rogue One. There is a lot of Star Wars TV coming our way.

And finally, we come to the LRM Online report, which claims that many of these shows — The Mandalorian, the Ahsoka show, the Thrawn show, a Boba Fett show and another show yet to be discovered — will all be connected through one central storyline, with Dave Filoni in charge of coordinating the whole thing.

Reportedly, the inspiration for this idea is Game of Thrones, which had several story threads running at once — Daenerys is doing her thing in Essos while Jon Snow treks beyond the Wall while Tyrion schemes in King’s Landing, etc. The idea here would be for each Star Wars show to represent one thread of a bigger story, with Disney determined to release a new Star Wars show every quarter. The Obi-Wan and Cassian Andor shows, being one-and-done miniseries, wouldn’t be a part of this.

I’ll stress at this point that this is an unconfirmed report, but I can see Disney trying to pull this sort of thing. It reminds me of what they’re doing with their upcoming Marvel shows. Already, they have series like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, Loki and Hawkeye in the pipeline, plus some more shows we apparently don’t know about yet. They’ll all tell their own stories, but will play into each other. A shared Star Wars TV universe seems like an extension of that.

But I really hope it’s not true, because again, The Mandalorian’s biggest strength may have been that it was allowed to do its own thing, and that the thing it was doing was fairly simple, a pretty straight-forward episodic series with a longer-term arc baked in. If they go in this other direction, I’m already exhausted thinking about all the stuff I may have to watch to keep up with the story.

But we don’t need to get worried (or excited) just yet. With filming on pretty all shows on hold thanks to the coronavirus, it’ll be a while before this grand vision comes to fruition, if it ever does. I can at least see how the second season of The Mandalorian goes down before freaking out.

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